Bitcoin Forum

Does anyone think that some day Bitcoin may become mine-able again?  Could advances in technology make it possible again?  I was reading something last night about quantum computing being just around the corner.  i am not talking in the short term here i mean like in 30 - 50 year time scale.

In the beginning it was, because the manufacturers in a way did not think it would last forever so they kept producing mining gear and selling them. Then bitcoin mining became stable and they realised they can more then double their profits by mining them self.

Fact is, that Bitmain first uses their top gear equipment to mine for themself (to test it) months pass and in a later stadium they sell them having make the most profit.
So no I don't think it will ever be possible again.. with bitcoin atleast.

If you get access to a quantum computer, so will everyone else. If you have $1 million and someone else has $99 million (or collectively have 99), your million will still only represent 1% of the mining power.

This is all basic math and economics. Your mining ability/profit will only ever be as great as your financial status vs. the rest of the miners as a whole. If you own 1% of the mining power, you get 1% of the coins. If there is $99m of mining equipment out there, this means you must have $1m to obtain that 1%.

What hardware is released is absolutely irrelevant because if you can get it, so can everyone else. It's entirely a money game. How much money do you have?

Average joe have return in mining only when he steals electricity from employer. Heard many stories like that.

AFAIK, 21.co is working on that mission.

Affordable 3D printers for silicon chips would do the trick. It would be bigger than just Bitcoin mining if/when that happened, but it would have the effect you're looking for.

It's not entirely impossible that mining might become profitable for individuals with moderate budget again in the future. But I don't think it's really likely - at least not in the current environment and in the near term.

To make it possible either a new highly efficient mining chip must be offered for sale to the general public or a rather unrealistic event causes a significant difficulty drop coupled with a increase in Bitcoin's fiat valuation. It would also be theoretically possible that Bitcoin forks to use a different hashing algorithm for security reasons, rendering current ASIC miners useless.

Even if one of these events takes place I still doubt that mining will become profitable for individuals everywhere. It most certainly will be limited to those regions with low electricity prices.

ya.ya.yo!

I think a change like that would have to be carefully orchestrated with the companies making the mining ASICs, or at least there would have to be some extensive measures taken to prevent or mitigate the inevitable hashrate crash. So any future CPU/GPU mining bonanza is probably not on the cards, unless a genuinely "ASIC-proof" solution is implemented.

imo there will never be return of mining to "average Joe" - everything went to shi*ters when asics came out, and since then it's mostly just chasing roi that never comes.
The whole deal seams rigged to the chip producers, they are the ones in control, the very best you can do is chase some borderline profits (unless you dont pay for electricity you consume)

This was one reason j had been considering, although as has been said a hashrate crash would be bad   :(

hence why putting chip production in everyone's hands will flip the game.

No. Then those with more money will print faster than others. You end up with the same situation. If a 3d printer takes 1 hour to make a chip and the printer is $1, someone with $100 can buy 100. Someone with $1m can buy 1m of them and hire others to help run them. In that case, the guy with $100 still just has 100/1,000,100 of the hash rate and will get almost nothing. Not to mention the guy with more money would go straight to the manufacturer of the 3d printers and offer a premium to obtain all of them that are created, as opposed to marketing it to the masses.

If bitcoin reach next year the 1000 dollars or even the 800 i do believe the average joe can return into bitcoin without have to steal eletricity from the provider, i dont know how much cost to keep a miner and the raise into the bill, but sure now only big miners and which has free energy or very cheap are able to get their miners active.

::) And your scenario differs from the CPU/GPU mining days in what way exactly? You're essentially saying "there's a limited amount of silicon ore available". No shit.

Will you be happy if there's a ban on people owning more than their "fair share" of chip 3D printing capacity? This is Bitcoin: communists go home

I would like to see side-chains or some Alt coin that needs it's own mining, but would still be linked to Bitcoin. So you have Core being mined by the mining farms and you have these side-chains being mined by the smaller guys. If this makes sense in any way.

It would be great if individuals could get into mining again, because this was the most exiting part of Bitcoin for me when I started out. These days, it's all about hoarding and trading and mining worthless Alt coins. This is pretty boring. ^hmm^ 

I believe that it is possible that new devices are manufactured to let regular people mine without needing to have a mining farm and invest a lot of money in mining equipment. it is similar to advances in computer hardware. a couple of years ago computers were not this powerful with the CPU and GPU powers that are currently available to all of us.

and it is already happening too:
http://www.coindesk.com/bitmain-release-new-bitcoin-miner-bid-attract-hobbyists/

I dont think there would change something if the minings are returning because the blocks to search for the bitcoins are getting bigger so slower cutting them coins.

CPU mining days were only a select few. There's a massive difference between a small group of people who mine it for lulz when it has no value and those who are mining it for profit. That should be obvious -- something that has ZERO value at the time, NO uses, etc. would obviously not be competitive.

GPU mining screwed most (if not all) people who took part, due to basic economic concepts. So let's break this down.

You buy a GPU for $300. BTC is at $100. You spend $1/day in electricity and mine for 5 months. At this point, your total cost (not including time) is $450. Over this period, you mined 1.5 BTC, and BTC is worth $500 now.

At this point you've spent $450 + time, and in return, you've gotten 1.5 BTC, or $750, for a profit of $300, right?

You could have, instead, spent that $450 on BTC in the beginning. Now you'd have 4.5 BTC, or $1350, for a profit of $900.

Essentially, you not only wasted your time, but you also LOST $900 in the process. And all of this ignores all of the other things that are involved with mining (such as the other PC hardware being burned out, cooling cost consideration, etc.

Hell, we can even take the pizza time period. For $20 you could have gotten 10k BTC. Instead, you spend $500 building a rig so you can mine a few hundred/thousand BTC. Were both profitable? Yeah. But your mining actually cost you significantly more than you'd have earned if you had skipped the time sink, work, and risk, and just bought BTC outright.

I have not even heard of a single miner who has profited EQUAL to, much less above, what they could have earned if they skipped that and simply bought the coins.

Then again, this goes into economics, which is something the vast majority of people seem to have zero knowledge about.

I dont think it is very clever to return the miners because i know for sure that they are not making any proft maybe the bigger miners will make some but the blocks are to huge.

This was one of the key exciting things for me when getting into bitcoin i had the option to make my own money ffrom home.  Honestly i dont think it will happen in a way you can make a decent profit for average joe again.  I'd be happy to break even with a simple machine to do this on.

Well, who have you talked to? I don't think firms like Bitmain or BTCC are particularly open about their mining profits. I don't think you have the numbers to make these determinations. Plus, that example is cherry picked. Like any other entrepreneurial endeavor, enter if you have an edge. Otherwise, stay out. The people that lost were the people that invested in GPUs near the end of their usefulness (many of whom put those to use on alts), or bought pre-order ASICs and didn't account for time and difficulty growth.

Anyway, my main point is that these numbers we can pull out of our asses just don't apply to the big mining firms. Particularly in China, where there is significant oversupply of electricity in certain areas.

You could only make as much as the money you put in. Being an "average joe" would also get you an "average" mining rig. Even if average joes are capable of having mining rigs, there would be too much of them since they're average. That would make the people who has an expensive mining rig stand out more.

Wrong. You only need to take a look at the hashrate responding to the price during the CPU/GPU era to see exactly how competitive it was. The very fact that GPU mining was developed at all is a testament to that. But y'know, this is straying into economics, not everyone is au fait with that lol

I was under the impression the topic was about the "average joe," as stated in the title. Not about corporate (i.e., massively-funded companies). What you're saying when you bring them into the equation is like saying "the lottery is profitable... didn't you know every month or so someone wins?" Ignore the other 99.99999998% of the players and you're absolutely right.

Yeah, and if we're talking about "average joes" that mined with GPUs pre-ASIC, I've never met one that didn't profit immensely. Sure, you can cherry pick buy/sell dates to paint this picture that buying and holding bitcoin was more profitable, but you're not providing any data, nor have you shown any consideration of miner costs. In any case, your assertion that "GPU mining screwed most (if not all) people who took part" is completely insane.

Like I said:

Your arguments don't really apply to GPU miners. But they probably apply to misguided home miners pre-ordering ASICs.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe GPU mining came out near the end of 2010. At this point, you can view a price history chart and find that BTC was worth anywhere from $0.006 to $0.08, depending on when this occurred. I'm inclined to believe that the GPU mining was the onset of the price increase, rather than at the end (which would also correlate to the hash rate). So $6 was worth 1,000 BTC. If you spent $300 on a GPU, that was the equivalent to 300/6=50*1k=50k BTC. I doubt anyone mined 50k BTC with a single GPU. Even if we go with a bit of the ways into the hash rate increase (when GPU was undeniably in effect), you'd still be looking at 25k BTC per GPU. This, again, assumes 1) you don't value your time at all, 2) you have free electricity, 3) your hardware had zero issues and nothing had to be replaced. All three are very, very unlikely stories.

Official history shows that in early 2010, when BTC was worth almost nothing (read: CPU days), someone couldn't even sell 1k BTC for $50. There was zero market. Those who were mining with their CPU could have gotten nearly free coins WITHOUT the other costs, simply by making an offer to buy the then-worthless coins.

Anyways, everyone's free to do as they wish. All I can do is try to open peoples' eyes to what they're missing -- the next step is up to them.

Again, you're cherry-picking one date that maximizes the potential profit of buying and holding and minimizes the potential profit of investing in GPUs. Yes, the first GPU miners were released in late 2010, but GPUs were widely used through 2012. You can't use Bitcoin's price in 2010 as a basis for this; it's a very dishonest cherry-picking of the data. It also doesn't account for a miners' use of GPUs after he stopped mining Bitcoin (mining alts, selling equipment).

Just in my opinion, by time quantum computing will not happen until it is needed in order to mine bitcoin.  If you think about it, some of these mining companies are mining at speeds compared to quantum computing now if you add up the amount of computing they are doing right now.

@ranlo,

 You make some good points and I have to say that for years Ive told people its typically been better to buy coins than to invest into mining gear. I still feel this is true but no one knew that at the time. Hindsight is 20/20 so they say...  Had the price of Bitcoin not gone up then mining would have been more profitable than buying and holding. An example of just that is Litecoin. Over the past.... 2 years? difficulty has been nearly flat and price hasnt changed much. Those who are mining are making profit while those who bought coins are not gaining anything. While I feel its fair and correct to say that people would have been better off to buy coins rather than mine, I dont feel its fair to say they lost anything. You cant lose something you dont yet have.

More on topic, I dont think mining will ever really go back to the average joe as we have seen in the past. If it ever does become widely decentralized it wont be as we know it today. Id guess we would all have toasters and microwaves with mining chips in them or something like that.

I  have to say that these are valid points; however I do not think that this will change whether or not mining will return.  I think it is so far out of the box for regular joes that you will never be able to effectively mine bitcoin without some sort of large investment no matter the improvements in technology.

the mining will never return to ordinary people because it is extremely unprofitable to mine bitcoins

There is to much money involved for the mining to return to the small people in the world until the point where it is not profitable to the large companies, which will never happen.  There are tom many large companies out there that are controlling all of the mining.